Ideas from Mark Stout

For those of us who saw the beginnings of the Apple vs. Microsoft battle in the 1980's, what we are seeing with the nascent tablet market seems awfully familiar.  Except this time, Microsoft is played by Google.   This is the topic of this week's Family Tech column . Thanks to my brother Jim for his memories of this time.  This column started as a conversation with him at my parents home.  And thanks as usual to Mom for her grammar and punctuation suggestions!

I got to think about how much clutter I could have avoided if only today's technology had been available to me all my life.   This week's Family Tech column talks about how I wouldn't be burdened with shelves full of books, boxes of old video tapes, and how I wouldn't have needed to throw out my old college notebooks somewhere along the line.

Avoiding grocery shopping while hungry is one way to keep a handle on your food costs.  The other is to make a list, and stick to it. Gadgets make grocery lists easier.  If grocery chains were smart, they'd come up with their own shopping Apps. This is the topic of this week's Family Tech column .

The concepts in this week's Family Tech are likely already known to readers of this blog.  If family members though ask how do you keep up with all the news you do, you might refer them to this column.  It is all about using Google Alerts, RSS feeds and Twitter to find the information we need for our business and personal lives.

Do you ever need to enter a lot of dates into Google Calendar?  The Google Student Blog shows a way for students to easily enter in all the various dates in a course syllabus into Gcal.  The same technique can be used by anyone who needs to enter a lot of dates at the same time, say from a new project for example.

Even writing this week's column made me angry and made my heart go out to the kids who now have school yard bullying following them into their home and keeping them up all hours of the night